Octopus, Calamari, and Classical Music

Thursday April 14th, 2016Tuesday April 19th, 2016 aglaia Leave a comment

Octopus, cuttlefish, and calamari replace meat during the forty days of Lent preceding Easter giving us one more excuse to enjoy our beloved cephalopods!

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Schools close for two weeks for Easter in Greece, which we celebrate on May 1^st this year. But when I was growing up Easter was the most frustrating ‘vacation.’ Theaters and cinemas were dark during holy week, except for the few that showed the Passion of Christ and other biblical-Hollywood films, which we ended up seeing repeatedly.

Most were low budget black and white movies, which my friends and I identified with code-names. One we called “the merci” because, although dubbed into Greek, Mary Magdalene in one scene thanked Christ in perfect French. In another of those movies, dubbed ‘the bicycle,’ an anachronistic two-wheeler was clearly visible traversing the background of the frame during the climactic crucifixion scene. (more…)

Recycling my Marmalade

Wednesday April 13th, 2016Tuesday April 19th, 2016 aglaia Leave a comment

We still have quite a few jars of perfectly delicious marmalade and various jams from years past, I realized as I was arranging in my cupboards the new pots of Seville orange marmalade I made last week. Besides offering to friends, using it as an ingredient –instead of sugar—in cakes and breads, I thought that maybe I could use these leftover marmalades to make some kind of fruit ‘cheese,’ or a locum (Turkish delight). These intensely citrus-flavored pastes would surely make bites infinitely more interesting than the usual colored rose-water, I thought.

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Looking up recipes, I was sure somebody else had probably thought of thickening a jam to create fruity bites, but I didn’t find anything on the web, so I decided to improvise, starting from the basic recipes for Turkish delights. (more…)

A Spicy, Versatile Meat Sauce

Monday April 4th, 2016Sunday June 12th, 2022 aglaia Leave a comment

Spicy Ground Meat is one of the latest all-purpose sauces I try to have in my fridge or freezer, divided into cups.

Ground meat, from the local free-range veal of the island, is something that I use a lot. The dark red meat is delicious, but quite tough and stringy, and for that reason I prefer to choose a nice piece, usually soon after my butcher has slaughtered an animal, and mince the meat somewhat coarsely. Unlike most of our neighbors, I rarely make Keftedes, but sometimes I do make my kind of burger, mixing the minced meat with bacon, onion, herbs and plenty of breadcrumbs or ground rolled oats.

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It makes no sense to cook less than one, or better two pounds of ground meat, as I did the other day. I mince the onions, garlic and add either grated carrots or mashed corn kernels, then the spices and flavorings, as well as the herbs. It only needs to briefly simmer with wine and lemon juice, and it is ready for many uses. It is insane to go to all the trouble and prepare just 2 cups of Spicy Ground Meat.

The resulting, pre-cooked Meat Sauce can be used simply with pasta, to make my kind of Eastern Mediterranean Bolognese with penne, tortiglioni, or any other large, hollow pasta shapes: Boil the pasta 1 min. less than the package suggests, reserving 1 cup of the water. Then warm the meat sauce over medium heat, toss with the pasta (3-4 cups meat sauce for 1 pound of pasta) and if it is too dry, pour in ½-1 cup of the pasta cooking water. Just before serving, I love to fold in coarsely chopped cilantro from the garden that makes everything more delicious. The sauce is flavorful enough, so you can omit the cheese; at least we do. (more…)

My Green Taramosalata

Monday March 14th, 2016Monday March 14th, 2016 aglaia 1 Comment

Lately I have moved from rengosalata –smoked herring or kipper spread— our family’s traditional Kathari Deftera spread, back to the common taramostalata –carp or cod roe spread.

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Fortunately, we can now get good quality carp roe, a far cry from the salty and tasteless, red-dyed one, that was the basic ingredient for the iconic meze. I guess my mother had chosen to make the more time-consuming smoked herring spread because she couldn’t stand the pink, salty, yet flavorless taramosalata that the majority of taverns and homes served.

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She prepared rengosalata using the roe of smoked herring (kipper) carefully choosing a herring with swollen belly to make sure it had enough roe for the spread. In the turn of the 20th century wealthy Athenians used Russian caviar, or avgotarraho for the iconic, elegant Kathari Deftera meze. (more…)

Instant Pies with Greens or with Chocolate and Nuts

Wednesday March 9th, 2016Sunday March 13th, 2016 aglaia 3 Comments

Skillet pies –tiganokouloures or tiganopsoma in Greek, and gözleme or saç böreği in Turkish— have become our everyday project these days.

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There are three reason for this late obsession of ours: First because Costas has almost completely mastered the art of rolling perfect phyllo and he is eager to use his new skill as often as possible; second, we gather plenty of wonderful, juicy spinach as well as chervil, fennel and other aromatic herbs from the garden; the third, and probably the most important reason of these repeated attempts is the newly acquired electric saç (hot-plate) that I brought from Istanbul.

Not that skillet pies cannot be cooked perfectly on a griddle or ridged skillet. They are ingenious creations of the frugal Mediterranean cooks who prepared in minutes a delicious snack or meal with whatever they happened to have at hand: wild or cultivated greens and herbs, grated zucchini or squash, eggplant, pepper or even cooked grains or beans, usually flavored with cheese and/or sausage. The recipe I have in my Mediterranean Vegetarian Feasts can be prepared in any kitchen, either here, or on the other side of the Atlantic. And this has been proven, since David Tanis chose to publish it at the New York Times, calling it ‘Greek Pie on the Skinny Side’.

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